Paul Taylor: Will the royal wedding bring us all together?

A lady of my acquaintance will be going to an "anti-royal wedding party" on Friday. Having cocked a snook at the monarchy, she will then go home, turn on the TV and, yes, watch Prince William and Kate Middleton getting spliced, having set the recorder for the event about which she is supposedly so indifferent. This neatly sums up the complex relationship we have with royalty in 2011. We are less deferential, more inclined to respect people for their achievements than the accident of their birth.

A lady of my acquaintance will be going to an "anti-royal wedding party" on Friday. Having cocked a snook at the monarchy, she will then go home, turn on the TV and, yes, watch Prince William and Kate Middleton getting spliced, having set the recorder for the event about which she is supposedly so indifferent.

This neatly sums up the complex relationship we have with royalty in 2011. We are less deferential, more inclined to respect people for their achievements than the accident of their birth.

And yet we love a glamorous wedding. It’s not just the frocks, it’s the optimism of two people making such a pledge.

Many of us can clearly remember another time when an heir to the throne took a wife and future queen. When Prince Charles and Diana married on July 29 1981, I was a reporter on the Droylsden Reporter. Having swallowed the harsh medicine that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had dished out, this part of the world had few reasons to be flying any patriotic flags. And yet the red, white and blue came out.

My mission that day was to put Droylsden’s Carnival Queen in my rusty Ford Fiesta and take her to as many street parties as humanly possible, along with a photographer to capture images of tables groaning with sandwiches, streets decked with bunting, United Jacks fluttering in the breeze and loyal toasts being made.

My abiding impression was not of people fervently doffing a cap to their "betters", but of people seizing an excuse to spend time with those they would normally give only a nod in passing.

By 1981, we had already begun to bemoan the disappearance of community in Britain, and that day seemed to recapture something we feared we had lost.

Fast-forward 30 years through several sundered royal marriages, the death of Diana and her replacement in the media with a rabid, low-rent celebrity culture, will we celebrate this royal wedding as we did in 1981?

A blizzard of polls suggest not. Eighty per cent of us don’t care about the wedding, said one. More people would want to attend Kate Moss’s wedding than Kate Middleton’s, said another.

But yet another poll suggests that 48 per cent of us will be watching the royal wedding live on TV – roughly equivalent to the numbers who watched Charles and Di’s big day. Despite all the stories about jobsworth councils standing in the way of street parties, the chances are that thousands of unofficial parties will take place across the land.

Even as a lifelong republican, I’m forced to acknowledge that our relationship with the royals, however ambivalent, is part of the glue of British society.

The royal wedding day will be one of those rare occasions when we as a nation, look around at ourselves and take stock.

If that brings us together – even for an "anti-royal wedding party" – we may be better for it.

A COLLEAGUE has a provocative theory that there has never been a good rock band with a name beginning with ‘K’.

Kinks, Killers, Kings of Leon... erm, Kula Shaker, I say to her. But she is unmoved.

I have a theory of my own, even more provocative: all the best band names have now been taken.

I began to suspect this when Joan As Police Woman came into view. Singer-songwriter Joan Wasser chose a name so risible that I’m surprised she could keep a straight face. Imagine a male singer-songwriter calling himself, I dunno, Kevin As Traffic Warden.

There always were bands whose name-choosing veered towards the daft. The greatest expression of English pop whimsy came from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

But several decades, and thousands of band name permutations later, there’s a certain desperation to the likes of Bowling For Soup and !!!, the latter requiring instructions on how to pronounce it (chk, chk, chk, apparently)

In recent times, there have been young pretenders with such names as Does It Offend You, Yeah? and Everybody Was In The French Resistance... Now.

A chap called Sam Duckworth has thought it wise to trade for several years under the musical moniker of Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. A Swedish guitar-strummer with the perfectly serviceable name of Kristian Matsson chooses instead to be known as The Tallest Man On Earth – ripe for a complaint under the Trade Descriptions Act. Because he’s not.

It was all so much simpler at the dawn of rock ’n’ roll, when names like The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and The Who were still there to be had, and British warblers needed only to pick a pseudonym sounding racy and vaguely American. Hence Harry Webb became Cliff Richard, and his mate Brian Robson Rankin became Hank Marvin.

Best of all were the stable of singers managed, and renamed, by impresario Larry Parnes.

And yet when Jay McCallister, a singer from London now chooses an alias, he comes up with the truly bathetic name Beans On Toast.

Rock ’n’ roll hasn’t died. But it has run out of good names.

Wednesday whinge

KNOW what I miss? Dimpled beer glasses. Once the favoured drinking vessel of blokes who thought beer in a straight glass was a sign of effeminacy, the dimpled glass has faded from view in recent years.

Why so... is it expense? The handled jug’s frightening efficiency as a weapon? The closure of various domestic companies producing this oh-so-English ale device?

Anyway, good news. A colleague reports sightings of dimpled glasses at various Manchester drinkeries, including The Molly House in the Gay Village and the Port Street Beer House in the Northern Quarter. Is this the start of a comeback?